Women first, prosperity for all. This was the theme of the 10th Global Entrepreneurship Summit, hosted late 2017 in Hyderabad. A recent five-country study, commissioned by the British Council, on the mutual interdependence of social enterprise initiatives and women’s empowerment movements provides insights into the strategies for—and barriers to—long-term change.

Social enterprises span a wide range of emerging industries. Some integrate rural youth, including young women, into India’s thriving business process outsourcing (BPO) industry as call-center employees. Taxi services by and for women, such as Sakha Consulting Wings, train and employ women in the male-dominated field of commercial driving.

Yet some participants were skeptical that financial empowerment and market integration, without parallel (and often unprofitable) efforts to change ingrained mindsets, could accomplish all that is needed to put women and girls on equal footing with men. Their caution echoed deeper concerns about the place of social enterprise within the constellation of other models comprising India’s social sector.

At a Kolkata focus group, participants raised a provocative question: Do we really need to distinguish NGOs from social enterprise? As a whole, the group agreed that women’s empowerment should be the key issue, rather than who does it.

Many hope social enterprise can transform this image of the social sector by making both “doing good and doing well” possible. But as policy develops over time to recognize and support social enterprise in India, the sector must avoid several pitfalls if it is to maximize the hybrid model’s benefits for women.

Read the full article about social change in India by Isabel Salovaara and Jeremy Wade at Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Giving Compass' Take:
• Stanford Social Innovation Review explores the challenges nonprofits in India must face: doing a lot with a little. What can we learn from their frugality and effectiveness?
• One major takeaways is that cutting overhead costs isn't useful if you're cutting back on the very things that create impact. Be smart and look to partnerships for scale.
• Here's how philanthropy helps India's progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.
For any nonprofit to make noteworthy progress toward breaking the grinding cycle of intergenerational poverty in India, it’s not enough to impact thousands or even tens of thousands of constituents — not when more than 260 million people on the subcontinent live on less than $2 a day. In India, effective nonprofits think in terms of reaching hundreds of thousands and often millions of people in need. An additional challenge: Most Indian nonprofits must strive to grow while stretched for resources.

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